Customer Reviews

Linux Server Hacks, Volume Two: Tips & Tools for Connecting, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting

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Are you a system administrator? If you are, then this book is for you! Authors Bill Von Hagen and Brian K Jones, have done an outstanding job of writing volume two of a book that focuses on cool hacks they developed or used in their server and system administration careers.

Von Hagen and Jones, begin by exploring the authentication options that are available to you in heterogeneous networked computing environments and simplify administering user accounts and passwords. Then, the authors explore ways of connecting to remote systems. Next, the authors explain how to set up central servers that do things like synchronize the time on all the systems in your environment, deliver IP addresses to newly connected hosts, and integrate these services with existing ones. The authors then present a variety of cool sysadmin tips and techniques that they've accumulated over the years, including how to keep processes running without writing a daemon or staying logged in, how to use PXE to netboot Linux, how to share information with fellow sysadmins in a centralized fashion, how to get the most out of classic but incredibly useful terminal-oriented applications, and so on. They continue to explore some cool ways of making it easier for you to manage storage, deploy new systems, do backups of today's huge disks, and even reduce the need for some of the restore requests that occasionally clog every sysadmin's inbox. Then, the authors provide some tips and tricks for managing distributed storage and making sure the administrative environments on your servers are synchronized. They then discuss a wide range of security tools and techniques that can help you sleep at night and protect your systems at the same time. Next, they provide techniques for optimizing system performance, whether by figuring out who's hogging the entire CPU and shooting down that user's network sessions or by using cool knobs in the /proc filesystem to tweak system performance or using journaling filesystems to minimize system restart time. Then, they include hacks that enable you to centralize log information in a variety of ways, be warned when problems arise, and get the most out of system status information, whether it's log information, internal disk controller status data, or remote hardware status information that you can collect via SNMP. Finally, the authors show you how to boot crippled systems so that you can diagnose problems, repair munged filesystems, and even recover deleted files of data that was stored on disks that have gone belly up.

This most excellent book has presented hacks that are techniques that the authors have used at various times. More importantly, they view these techniques as time- and hassle-savers that are usually downright fun and cool.

I can't say enough about the work done in Linux Server Hacks vII by the two Bs. Bill and Brian have hit the ball out of the ballpark with this one.

Just the section on LVM (Logical Volume Management) have saved my bacon!

Every single "hack" (read tip) is extremely practical, applicable and relevant to managing and administering Linux systems whether "servers" or not!

The absolute best part of this book is that you get really useful, insightful views into the experiences of seasoned veterans of Unix systems. If you sit in a NOC or if you're the 24x7 guy/gal on a server farm, this book is an occupational requirement! Everyone else will appreciate it if they're running Linux. In my modest network of perhaps 30 Linux systems, I can tell you that I saved hours of effort with just two of the hacks included in this volume. Considering the time savings, buying this book saved my company more than 300% on the cover price.

This is a very good book. These remarks are for Linux users on the way up. If you are already an über-üser, well, you will probably like this book anyway.

If you don't have the first volume, you might want to start with it. It has some simple but very useful things that apply to just about anyone with their own Linux box and a command line.

This volume is much more advanced, and most of the tricks and techniques deal with much more specialized problem domains, ie. things you might not have run into yet. One advantage of this book over the first is that it is very up to date in its recommendations of existing software to use.

The second volume of Bill von Hagen and Brian K. Jones' Linux Server Hacks: Tips & Tools For Connecting, Monitoring, And Troubleshooting takes the original volume one step further, following up with an offering of over a hundred fresh, new hacks in a second volume to expand Linux opportunities. Hacks here only take a few minutes to read through but provide many answers to problems ranging from remotely running a GUI Linux desktop environment for end users to centralizing Windows font resources and combining network storage areas on new servers.

'Linux Server Hacks Volume Two' by William von Hagen is an outstanding companion guide for ALL Linux users and administrators. Packed with over 450 pages and 100 new hacks not in Volume 1, these aren't just known by everybody things that you can do with Linux, these are hot tips and tricks that most any Linux freak can excel from learning about.

Chapters Covered:

01. Linux Authentication
02. Remote GUI Connectivity
03. System Services
04. Cool Sysadmin Tools and Tips
05. Storage Management and Backups
06. Standardizing, Sharing, and Synchronizing Resources
07. Security
08. Troubleshooting and Performance
09. Logfiles and Monitoring
10. System Rescue, Recovery, and Repair

Pick this book up now, you will NOT be disappointed in this delcious Linux FEAST!!

***** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Even though the topic of GNU/Linux system administration is a very fast moving target with lots of features being added to Linux environment nearly every few months (and thus rendering many books a little bit outdated), some books are good enough to have a place on the bookshelf of a system administrator. Linux Server Hacks Volume 2, together with Volume 1, is one of those books. Whether you are responsible for a few Linux servers or trying to manage a few thousand servers, the tips and tricks presented in this book will prove to be a valuable asset for your skill set (though, if you're managing a few thousand Linux servers than you'll probably know at least %50 or more of the tips provided in the book).

The book is guaranteed to be a very good and advanced starting point for topics related but not limited to authentication, remote GUI connectivity, storage management, file sharing and synchronizing resources, security / lockdown instructions, log files and monitoring, troubleshooting, system rescue, recovery, and repair. Especially the chapters about heterogeneous network environments in which Linux and Windows machines should work in harmony is a very critical one for many sys. admins. And I'm sure all the geeks and nerds out there will enjoy reading Hack #20 "Hack 20. Quick and Easy DHCP Setup" and Hack #21 "Integrate DHCP and DNS with Dynamic DNS Updates".

All the little tricks I wish I could keep in my head. The hacks books are a wonderful resource for any sys admin.

Excellent Book. Who said an old dog can't learn new tricks. Found several little tid-bits that have trimmed a number of my scripts or changed the way I've implemented services! A great desktop companion for advanced and intermediate admins.

This is an excellent followup to the original Linux Hacks books. The hacks in this book are focused primarily on power users and sysadmins. These are practical and helpful tips that should be of great benefit directly to the reader. In addition each hack acts as a starting point for even more interesting work by the reader in areas relating to the original hacks.

Lots of good direct information and inspiration.